Its amazing that the left and the right can't agree on anything, not even it being illegal to lie on gun applications, but once IP is tossed in the game they all fall on some pretty strong protectionist postions.
I'm not making some big statement here, but it just goes to show that guys like Lawrence Lessig and the EFF keep losing because they have so few allies in government and have the most powerful enemies, the various deep-pocketing IP abusers like tech firms or Disney.
What now? Back to our DRM-laden lives with no silver lining I guess. Shame that the profit on mass entertainment trumps all rights. I wonder if my Slingbox is illegal now. Probably not, supposedly this decision is narrowly written, which is a welcome change from the big sweeping conservative-led majority decisions of late.
People who regularly watch the court know that judges falling into "Left" and "Right" camps are the exception, not the rule. There are typically splits were some of the "Left" judges agree for reason X and some disagree for reason Y, and/or some "Right" judges agree for reason Z and disagree for reason W.
And that's a good thing. This isn't a sports game where I should root for "my team." The judges shouldn't start from the end position they want and work towards that.
The endless 5-4 decisions of late tend to contradict that. Most judges are predictable. Roberts and Breyer being an exception, and slightly less predictable.
5-4 decisions tend to be the ones that make news. For the most part, the judges on the court agree with each other. In the the current term through June 18, 2014, only 14% of Supreme Court cases were settled in a 5-4 vote.
> 5-4 decisions tend to be the ones that make news.
Decisions on issues that have high political salience tend to be the ones that make news; there is currently something of a correlation with political salience and 5-4 split decisions on the courts, since Justices positions are most ideologically (rather than legally) consistent on points that were politically salient at the time of their appointment, and the issues with the strongest political salience also are often relatively consistently salient over an extended period of time, and since the court splits at or close to 5-4 on a lot of enduringly-salient issue areas.
But plenty of 9-0 issues on issues that have current salience make news, and 5-4 decisions on which the justices are split but there isn't a great deal of political salience often aren't treated as any more newsworthy than any other decision.
I went looking through those 5-4 cases to see if were along the left/right line. Only 4 of the 8 had Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas on the same side.
(The second had Thomas writing the opinion and Scalia writing the dissent. That's pretty rare.)
EDIT duh, that's what the color-coding was for. Oh well.
I think you are confusing "left and right" with "mainstream Democratic and Republican politicians". These categories don't really overlap all that much.
Intellectual property law is the pride and joy of our legal system.
Really.
Patents, Copyright and Trademarks are all American inventions that have spread everywhere in the world. Many Americans think it goes too far, but in the fraternity of lawyers and judges, IP rules.
I believe that's the key insight. "Intellectual property" is good (in the sense of generating lots of work) for the legal profession. Judges tend to rule towards things that benefit the legal profession(s), and against things that don't benefit those profession(s).
However, you're wrong in point of fact. Copyright is an English law thing, a statute law, not a common law. Look up "Statute of Queen Anne". It's from 1710. Patents seem to be a British or Venetian thing. The USA almost didn't have a patent or copyright system, Thomas Jefferson was quite against them. For a long time, the USA allowed immigration on the basis of possessing some skill or patented idea - the USA was an "IP Outlaw". Not too surprisingly, this coincides with the USA's period of industrialization.
"Intellectual Property", the idea that one can own ideas, is just a bad idea, from an economic standpoint.
Reading your post it almost seems like Berne is an US city.
The Berne Convention was developed at the instigation of Victor Hugo of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale. Thus it was influenced by the French "right of the author" (droit d'auteur) (...) Before the Berne Convention, national copyright laws usually only applied for works created within each country. So for example a work published in United Kingdom by a British national would be covered by copyright there, but could be copied and sold by anyone in France. (...) The Berne Convention followed in the footsteps of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property of 1883, which in the same way had created a framework for international integration of the other types of intellectual property: patents, trademarks and industrial designs.
It's not true. IP law existed before the American revolution, and the US in fact initially refused to sign the major worldwide convention on IP law (Berne).
I'm not making some big statement here, but it just goes to show that guys like Lawrence Lessig and the EFF keep losing because they have so few allies in government and have the most powerful enemies, the various deep-pocketing IP abusers like tech firms or Disney.
What now? Back to our DRM-laden lives with no silver lining I guess. Shame that the profit on mass entertainment trumps all rights. I wonder if my Slingbox is illegal now. Probably not, supposedly this decision is narrowly written, which is a welcome change from the big sweeping conservative-led majority decisions of late.